


The Old City

by SectoBoss



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Copenhagen - Freeform, Dreamworld, Gen, Giants, Magic, Trolls
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-03
Updated: 2016-03-03
Packaged: 2018-05-24 10:26:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6150565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beneath the dreamworld’s waters and the city’s streets something is waiting. The old world never died, and now it needs some way to contact the new – and a naïve young mage might be just what it has been looking for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Late one evening as the sun washed the skies of Copenhagen a fiery orange, Lalli sat on the edge of his haven and stared out at the inky dark skies of the dreamworld.

What a week it had been, he thought as he furrowed his brow and let his legs dangle down to touch the water below. Trolls, giants, spirits, bad weather and collapsing buildings had conspired to make the last few days some of the worst since they’d rolled over that bridge just a short while ago. It amazed him how this city always seemed so have something new in store. Every time he thought he’d seen the worst the silent world had to offer it dredged up something else.

He leaned out and looked at his reflection in the mirror-still waters, eyeing his watery doppelganger for a minute before shattering it with a lazy swing of his boot that sent ripples skimming across the surface.

What next? That was the question that preyed on his mind, that preyed on the minds of all good scouts. More trolls? A bigger giant? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe something else, something he had no words for. He scowled and rested his chin on his palm, looking out at the strange place where the dreamworld’s horizon merged the water and the air. It shifted and swirled as he watched it, half-buried behind banks of fog, like a curtain in the wind.

He’d heard stories about what happened if you got too close to the horizon. Of what you saw, what you heard. Who you met.

Lalli made a noise that wasn’t quite a groan and wasn’t quite a sigh. He stretched and stood up, taking care not to knock any loose soil or pebbles from his haven down into the water. Onni had warned him against leaving a part of yourself behind in this place enough times when they were both younger. “It makes it too easy to come back,” he had said once, with a sad expression that lingered on that horizon for just a little too long.

He stretched some more, cracked a couple of his joints and was just about to turn back to his haven, to lie down on those boards and grab a few more minutes of sleep before he was sent out on another scouting mission, when the air in front of him shimmered and distorted. All of a sudden there was something in the dreamworld with him. Bleak rocks and wild grass, a trickle of water cutting through a cold and open landscape that couldn’t be more different from the verdant forests of his own. A sheep eyed him curiously from across a thin moat of dreamworld water that separated the two havens.

Of course. It would not be trolls or giants or spirits that would be his next challenge, he thought grimly. It would be _him_.

For just a second he wished dearly that it was Emil who was materialising in front of him instead. Emil, who he felt understood the power of boundaries and havens despite his lack of magic. Emil would not barge in unannounced. Emil would have asked, or maybe even wait to be asked.

But it wasn’t Emil, and never would be. Instead, here came Reynir – Lalli was pretty sure that was his name by now – trotting happily across his haven towards him, a gold-furred dog bouncing excitedly around his ankles.

Reynir came to within a few paces of the water that separated them before Lalli held up his hand and scowled. Reynir skidded to a halt and held up both hands in a placating gesture.

“I know, I know!” he said. “I haven’t forgotten!” He pointed at the water at his feet. “Look, I’m staying on my side, like we agreed.”

It was something Lalli had insisted on after one too many times of waking up with red hair and an idiot grin looming over him. His haven was his and his alone. Anything that came in came in with his invitation, something Reynir was unlikely to get anytime soon. If they needed to talk, their close proximity in the tank would put their havens close enough that they could speak across the gap.

Of course, it had quickly turned out that Lalli and Reynir had very different definitions of when talking was necessary.

“So…” Reynir said after a few seconds of silence, trying to ignore the glare Lalli was giving him. “How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Good! Um… yeah, that’s good. I’m fine too.” Another pause. “It’s been quite a week hasn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean there were those spirits that tried to kill us all, that giant, those trolls…” Reynir shuddered a little theatrically at the memory. “Emil and Mikkel still don’t believe us about the ghosts,” he added.

“Oh.”

“I keep telling them what happened, but Mikkel just sort of smiles a bit whenever I do and I don’t think he takes me very seriously. And Tuuri said Emil said I was full of… well…” Reynir coughed awkwardly and shrugged.

Lalli smirked as he filled in the blank. Emil Västerström had just climbed another notch in his estimation.

He started to turn around, intending to simply walk back into his haven and leave this foreigner babbling to the air. He was not in the mood for talk, not even slightly. All he wanted was just a few more seconds rest before he had to do his job. Was it too much to ask?

But as he turned he felt something.

It was formless, shapeless, a little snag that latched onto some primitive part of his brain and set alarm bells ringing there. He scowled in confusion and turned back round. His eyes darted from side to side, looking for anything out of the ordinary, but all he saw was Reynir staring back at him.

“Ummm… Lalli? Is everything ok?”

_“Shhh!”_

There it was again. An idea that seemed to brush up against his mind for a second before wafting away. It was like trying to grasp smoke – the harder he clutched, the easier it slipped around his fingers. But it was there all the same. The faintest sense that it wasn’t just the two of them out on the dreamworld’s seas. That they were being watched.

“Can you feel that?” he asked, cocking his head on one side.

“Feel what?” Reynir asked, looking around. “What is it?”

“Like there’s…” Lalli started.

“Like there’s what?”

But Lalli didn’t know the words. How to describe this strange feeling? He’d never felt anything like this before. Watched but… not. Surrounded but quite alone.

“You can’t feel that at all?” he asked at last.

“No!” Reynir spluttered. “I’m sorry!”

Lalli walked back to the edge of his haven and looked around. Above him the stars twinkled in their constellations. Below, the water was vast and pitch black. For a moment Lalli squinted into the water, trying to see past his own reflection, but he saw nothing.

“Forget it,” Lalli murmured. This was something he would have to ask Onni about when he got here. _If_ he got here, he corrected himself. Onni hadn’t come out this far since he had driven the spirits from the tank. Lalli suspected he was still recovering from the effort.

“I mean, I could try and feel it…” Reynir said, cutting into Lalli’s thoughts, puppydog enthusiasm spilling across his face. “Maybe if I stay here for a while! I could become a better mage if I did…”

Lalli’s expression said just how likely he thought _that_ was, and for once Reynir picked up on it.

“Or… maybe not,” he finished lamely, and looked a bit dejected.

“Stay in your haven,” Lalli said. “Don’t try and help.” Another snag, another jolt in his brain, made him twitch and scowl.

Reynir visibly deflated as Lalli turned on his heel and stalked back into the depths of his haven, the ferns and tree trunks sidling across the ground to hide him from view. Lalli didn’t pay much attention, too busy wrapped up in his own thoughts. With a jab of annoyance he realised it was probably time to wake up anyway.

 _At least Emil and Tuuri’ll be there_ , he thought as he began to wrap his magics up, collapsing his haven around him as he prepared to return to the waking world.

 

* * *

 

There is an expression, in a language long dead: _can’t see the wood for the trees._ When something’s staring you in the face but its sheer size makes it quite invisible. _  
_

Above the dreamworld, the bird’s path traces its skeins across the sky. And a bird flying along these roads would see a very different picture if it looked down.

In the middle of it all, the two specks of dry land. Forest and swamp, hill and heath, separated by a hair’s breadth. Black water all around them making them look like the last two stars in the sky.

Climb higher, look further.

The black has an edge. A circle is described in the water, marking the boundary between colours. Black inside, red outside. Water the colour of blood rings the darkness. And look even further, climbing so high now that the two havens are a single mote on a vast ocean, so high that the cold void beyond creation scrapes your back: a second circle around the first. Red inside, white outside.

Concentric rings under the water. A bird might not recognise them, but a human would.

Pupil, iris, sclera.

An eye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dun dun dunnnn! Stay tuned for part two!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now comes the chapter where I air out all my headcanons and hope I don't get pelted with rotten fruit...

_Ten years ago_

It is the day after the great victory at Kastrup. The buildings and hangars of the old airport bustle with activity.

Rising at dusk, the giants stir and lumber to their feet. Trolls and grosslings and nameless gobbets of meat scuttle around them, tending to them. They press broken bones back into place and hold wounds shut. Some even fold themselves into the gouges and craters left in the giants’ flanks by Danish guns, melding into them, using their own flesh as fuel for the regrowth.

In one hangar, the giants that cannot be saved lie down to rest. The damage they have suffered testifies to the ferocity with which the enemy fought when it realised what was at stake. There are ones that have been torn to shreds by Goliath tanks or charred to their skeletons by flamethrowers, ones that are twisted and warped by arcane energies deployed by foreign mages, ones that have been blasted apart by naval barrages and that are still forlornly trying to put themselves back together.

This hangar is the loudest. Occasionally, the agony of these condemned becomes too great and control over them is lost. They thrash and scream and howl until others can come in to restrain them, until they can be subsumed again by the mind that rules them all.

And at last, as the moon rises over the hills and looks down coolly upon fields that are tinged red and dotted with wreckage, the surviving giants leave the airport and make for the heart of the old city.

They take their captives with them.

It is a strange scene as they pass along the broken old roads and skirt the wreckage of buildings. Trolls scout the way, mapping paths, noting where the path has changed as the rubble shifts and settles. Giants follow, muscling aside obstacles with brute strength. And following them, shepherded by another set of giants and trolls, a small gaggle of humans maybe thirty strong. They wear ragged uniforms – tank driver, soldier, medic, mage – and shuffle and stumble over the broken ground. A few, the foreign mages especially, hiss and wheeze frightened gasps through strange masks. One, unable to walk, is carried tenderly in the claws of the same giant that took his leg.

At first they had screamed, when the giants or trolls first plucked them from amongst their comrades. Then, when the reality of their situation began to dawn, they begged for mercy or demanded answers. Now they are silent, cowed. They came expecting an easy win against mindless monsters. None of them know how to deal with defeat at the hands of an army that seems more disciplined than their own.

They walk all night, the giants never tiring, the weaker ones hitching rides on their mottled and slimy flanks when they falter. They pass along old roads and ancient monuments. One or two of the captives, forgetting themselves for a moment, stop to point at buildings they recognise from old books. The giants humour them, the mind inside their heads reminded of the tourists of eighty years ago.

Dawn is beginning to light the horizon when at last they stop outside a hulking concrete building. A battered sign nearby reads ‘Rigshospitalet’. Bulbous shapes protrude from broken windows and cracked walls, just visible in the half-light.

The captives are ushered inside, along corridors overgrown with meat, past walls that watch them with sagging and mutated faces. Eventually the corridors open out into a vast hollow space. This old building has been cored out by its new tenant. What used to be wards and operating theatres has become something more akin to a throne room.

One or two of the captives fall to their knees at the sight of the thing that awaits them. Several break down in tears. All of them go pale.

Lungs inflate, vocal cords thrum, a voice as old as the world speaks:

_“My name is Copenhagen.”_

 

* * *

 

The city demands answers.

The immune are kept behind as the non-immune are lead away to a fate none of the immune wish to think about, even with the evidence leering down at them from the ceilings and walls. And the monstrous thing before them, which claims to be only the tip of an iceberg that has infested the old city, begins to question them.

It wants to know who they are, where they are from, why they came here. It wants to know the finest minutiae of the world to the north, from geography and politics to agricultural capacity and technology levels. The slightest hesitation enrages it, no matter how weary and weak its captives become. Eventually it makes it clear that those who answer the most questions will be given water. It gets all the answers it wants after that.

Some of the more astute prisoners notice that behind the bluster and the cruelty of this thing there is a definite note of fear in its thick, garbled voice. This thing that thought itself master of all it surveyed has had its eyes torn wide open by Denmark’s invasion. It realises it may be in a more precarious position than it thought.

In another part of the building, the non-immune have their masks carefully picked off by trolls. They hold their breath for as long as they can, a forlorn and desperate effort, but in the end their reflexes take over and they gulp down mouthfuls of the hot, stinking air.

The city rumbles in satisfaction. These ones, it shall interrogate through more direct methods.

Over the weeks that follow, long after the last of the immune perished, the city sifts endlessly through the memories it has plucked from its newest ‘recruits’. It sees what has become of Denmark, walks down foreign streets, and hears the names of loved ones who will never be seen again. It learns the world to the north by living in it a thousand times over.

And it sees Kastrup from the other side, feels the pain and the terror and the confusion, and its victory begins to taste sour.

Deep in its brains, as it sees itself through new eyes, an emotion ignites that it has not felt since the old world fell: remorse.

 

* * *

 

Across Europe, all eyes turn to Copenhagen.

London, Berlin and Paris cease their squabbling over who should rule the continent’s carcass and look northwards in shock. Further afield, other conurbations hear the echoes of what is happening and shudder at the thought of it. Istanbul and Athens grow queasy at the rumours passed down the Balkans to them.

A city has turned on itself.

After a year of ferocious debate its mind has split, right down the middle like glass after an impact. _Kastrup was justified_ , Kastrup was not. _The northern nations are a threat_ , the northern nations could be allies. _We must kill them_ , we must meet them. _A great war was won,_ what followed was nothing short of a war crime.

The two sides separate, grow bitter, and as the rest of its kin watch in horror Copenhagen goes to war with itself.

Two minds that had once been one jostle for control of the infected. Giants and trolls rip each other to shreds in the streets. Buildings are brought down on top of enemy nests. The great trunks of nerve and sinew that connect the city’s nodes together are cut. Copenhagen’s streets run slick with blood and viscera. Pulped trolls and gored giants litter the roads.

The fighting becomes more brutal, the minds become more insidious. They fight for control of individuals. Giants crush their own heads to murder the other side out of them. In the world beyond the souls of the dead are knocked free from their resting places by the conflict. Howling and shrieking they tumble back into the real world, suddenly bound to their mummified corpses, keeping a vigil that is maddeningly lonely after over eighty years in the city’s embrace.

The carnage lasts for weeks. By the end Copenhagen is a shadow of its former self. Thousands of trolls and giants slip the leash of their erstwhile master and revert to their animalistic instincts. The few that remain under the city’s sway retreat into the old buildings and hunker down, ready to defend themselves should the uncontrolled ones come calling.

Slowly, the wreckage of the city becomes still and quiet, the crippled city uneasily coexisting with its feral children.

And then, after interminable years, a distant rumble echoes across the plains. Rotten ears prick up. Nameless structures of gristle and bone turn to face the coast. Eyes closer to the shore rush to report what they see.

Øresund Bridge is falling down.


End file.
